Re: Linkage of GPLed GCC to Closed Source via XML or Perl

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot com>]

I wrote:
> >James Michael DuPont asks lots of questions
> >indicating that he is attempting to find a legal way
> >around the GPL, so that he can attach
> >proprietary back-ends to GCC.
> >I would urge people not to give him any assistance,
> >even if he is only asking the questions out of
> >intellectual curiousity.

By your own words, you've been working for three years on trying to get
information out of GCC for use in other tools.  Even if you have no intent
of trying to attach proprietary back ends to GCC, you are working very
hard to enable others to do so.

> In that light, every GPLed Program can be compromised via alternative
> interfaces to function invocation other than linking, and GPL code can
> be translated into an external representation that is no longer code,
> but data.  All within the confines of the GPL.

You may well be right (though Eben Moglen has some good arguments that he
can persuade a court that artificial splitting of one program into two by
technical tricks can still be considered to be one program, I'm not a
lawyer so I don't know, and his argument clearly wouldn't work if standard
GCC interfaces work).  But why are you working so hard to do just that?
Even if your intentions are good, you are helping to bring about what you
object to.

> Also with Perl, you can just link to perl and you have
> gone around the GPL.

In this case I think you're wrong.  Perl is dual-licensed, but if you
link Perl to GPL (only) code, the program as a whole can only be
distributed under GPL terms.

> The GCC list has had many people who are interested in
> getting access to the compiler data, and many of them
> are turned away in a similar fashion.

I know.  It is a problem, and eventually people will do it, and the
result will be that people will subvert RMS's intent.  If they'd
figured out how to do this years ago, we'd now have no GNU C++ and
no GNU Objective-C.  In the long run, it's a losing battle, I agree.

> I think the GCC list has to ask itself,
> how long are we going to wait before addressing the
> issues at hand, and not just ignoring the problem to
> death. 

As long as possible, because as long as there isn't a really clean way
to attach proprietary front ends and back ends, people who are on the
fence about going proprietary or submitting their code back will choose
the latter.

> It is time to get our heads out of the sand and face
> reality.

There is value in postponing "facing reality".